Rowan Wilken

Rowan Wilken is a Principal Research Fellow and Associate Professor in the Technology, Communication and Policy Lab. His present research interests include mobile and locative media, digital technologies and culture, domestic technology consumption, theories and practices of everyday life, and the tensions between emerging and established media technologies. 

He is the co-editor (with Justin Clemens) of The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), co-editor (with Gerard Goggin) of Locative Media (Routledge, 2014) and Mobile Technology and Place (Routledge, 2012), and author of Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (Routledge, 2011).

At present he is working on two books: a research monograph, Cultural Economies of Locative Media (to be published by Oxford University Press), and an edited book (with Gerard Goggin and Heather Horst), Location Technologies in International Context (Routledge, 2018).

Labs

Digital Domesticity, Sustainability, and the Everyday

Digital Domesticity, Sustainability, and the Everyday examines the role of everyday life practices and homes as increasingly central hubs of digital engagement and smart infrastructure.

Automation and Social Futures

Automation and Social Futures engages with the ethical, political, social, organisational, cultural and governance implications of machine learning, algorithmic decision-making and digital infrastructures.

Digital Inclusion, Mobility, and Activism

The research program examines the challenges and potentials of digital participation as this relates to access and inclusion, connectivity, networks and political activism, gig or micro work, and mobility and migration.

Publications

Wi-Fi

From café culture to home schooling, remote community networks, and smart cities, Wi-Fi is an invisible but fundamental element of contemporary life. Loosely regulated, low-cost, and largely overlooked by researchers,...

Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life

The authors advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home.

News

DERC Researchers Rowan Wilken and James Meese awarded ARC Discovery Project

November 14, 2020

Rowan Wilken and James Meese have been awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery Project for their project 5G and the Future of Public Telecommunications.

DERC’s research on COVID continues to surge ahead

July 21, 2020

We may have been in lockdown, but that didn’t stop DERC researchers from launching several projects to study the pandemic.